Chapter 100. Exit Stage Right, Solomon Gunn
Present Time, 2158 CE, Citadel, Presidium, Final Wave Headquarters
Toran Aganian sat down at his desk and popped open a bottle of horosk – the taetrian response to krogan ryncol. The green-plated turian took a gulp of his homeworld's signature drink and spun in his chair with a sigh. It was a habit very unworthy of someone in his position, but then again, no one could see him right now and the circumstance he was in certainly permitted this slip-up on his part.
He stared at the ceiling and sipped on the dextro-alcohol.
Ever since he had gotten his ultimatum from the Shadow Broker, every day had been a bad day. Today was supposed to be different. Today, Gunn was supposed to be taken care of and – upon the request of the Broker's - his ally who they had identified as the person which had helped Gunn with the murder of Donovon Hock - a former human intelligence operative by the name Keiji Okuda who had already been on the Wave's and the Broker's target list for two years – had also been marked for termination. Additionally, Gunn's pesky journalist life partner, Emily Wong, was supposed to disappear alongside them as a favor to the benefactor that the Broker and the Wave shared. The plan had been easy and refined. They'd grab Gunn on his way home, pick off Okuda wherever he was hiding on Bekenstein and capture Wong at the apartment their former employee had received.
Three avians, one projectile, just like the humans preferred it.
In retrospective, Aganian should've known it wouldn't go down like this.
He looked at the message of the field team leader, one of his close former cabal colleagues.
Wong was secured, so at least PGI would be happy.
But that was where the good news ended.
The expeditionary team had failed to locate Okuda – again. It was like they were chasing a ghost or a dead man. While he was only a secondary target and Aganian had seriously doubted they'd ever touch him from the moment he'd gotten the dossier a week ago, this was already a stain on his record that he did not want to be there.
But since the thief eluding the agents he'd sent after him clearly wasn't enough to dent his mood, the universe – or rather Gunn – had delivered Aganian a second, much more surprising failure.
The squad of plain-cloth operatives – the best of the agents he considered trustworthy- who had been sent after Gunn had disappeared without a trace.
In the span of a minute, six elite Final Wave mercenaries had gone dark. They had reported that they would corner the human and that was the last he had ever heard of them.
Not that he had any trouble figuring out what had happened to them.
He narrowed his eyes at the news report currently running on his terminal. Since the office was mostly vacated due to working hours for his department having ended two hours ago, it was about the only source of noise currently being emitted on this floor.
The story was as simple as it was telling: a large-scale C-SEC operation with unknown cause was currently occurring just outside the HSA's presidium dock and had effectively locked down that entire portion of the Presidium. Considering the heavily armed officers and the sparse level of information that the public affairs officer was proving, Aganian suspected that the team sent to eliminate Gunn (and presumably the human as well) were lying dead somewhere in that part of the station and that C-SEC was currently trying to solve a seven-way shoot-out with seven fatalities and that he'd hear from the morgue's officials as soon as the bodies were identified as seven Final Wave operatives.
He pressed his mandibles against his jaw.
To think that Gunn would actually take six of his best operatives with him.
Clearly, he had underestimated the human.
The loss of the operatives was deeply regrettable.
But at least the matter was taken care of-
A flashing hologram on his desk informed him that the elevator had just arrived on their floor. Since he found that rather strange considering everyone besides Janera, the asari operations chief, was already at home, Aganian took a final sip of the bottle of horosk and decided to investigate.
Just as he got up from his desk, a crack loud enough to ring his ears despite his noise-canceling doors exploded from the office.
"Attention all personal. Unauthorized access detected on the seventh floor of the building. C-SEC has been notified. Until further notice, the building is being placed on lockdown. All security personal, remain on stand-by and follow the instructions of law enforcement. All civilian personal, remain at your work station and obey your supervisor's instructions," the synthetic house VI announced before reinforced shutters shut themselves on Aganian's windows and the pleasant brightness of a Presidium evening was replaced by the artificial lights of his office.
Despite the dextro-alcohol pumping through his system, the former cabal made a sound decision. He ran back to his desk and searched for his gun. If there was someone in the building who shouldn't be there, he'd have to get to them before they got to him-
Halfway through the first cabinet of his desk. Aganian froze.
The seventh floor was his floor.
They were already here.
As if to reinforce that realization, there was an audible crashing noise and asari-sounding yelp outside of his office.
"Oh cra-" he got out before his door came flying open with a purple glow and a very much alive Solomon Gunn stepped through, human-made assault rifle in hand.
"Good you're still here. This whole thing would've been really awkward and pointless if you'd gone home already," the human said calmly while leveling the weapon squarely at the turian's head, daring him to find his gun. He had ditched his Final Wave office attire for a dark-blue coverall and dark-blue hat that looked like it could belong to half the maintenance technicians on the Citadel and judging by the oddly square shapes underneath said coverall, he'd also picked up concealable body armor. Additionally to that small detail, Aganian noticed a faint shimmer around the human. It was hard to ignore a barrier shimmer if you had spent your life around biotics.
While he could explain away the armor, the flicker didn't make sense.
Solomon Gunn wasn't supposed to be a biotic.
Yet clearly-
The realization struck him like a thunderbolt.
Obviously you wouldn't want to advertise all of your abilities if you planned on a betrayal from Day One.
"Listen Gunn. If this is about the hit… I'm sure we can talk this out," he began while searching for the familiar weight of his pistol. Spirits, he had put it here somewhe-
A gunshot amplified by the confines of his office rang through Aganian's ears and suddenly the glass case behind him where he kept the souvenirs of his service shattered.
"Your hands in the air or a hole in your head. Your choice," the human responded while Aganian noticed the slumped-over body of Janera, who was lying next to the entrance to their floor. He wasn't sure if she was dead, but she certainly wouldn't be of any help to him in her current state.
Now if he could only-
"And don't you make me count," Gunn added.
Forty Minutes Earlier, 20. April 2417 AD, Citadel, Presidium
Morneau had to give it to the Wave.
They tidied up nicely.
Other than a hint of gas residue and a small scorch mark where the knockout grenade had exploded against the floor, there was no sign of them breaking in into their own apartment to abduct Gunn's girlfriend.
The door logs were clean, there were no signs of forced entry and everything looked just like he had left it this morning despite the fact that someone had been abducted in here.
Considering how fast Lancelot and he had gotten here, the clean-up crew had to have come in right behind the extraction team and still done splendid work. They'd probably even falsely reported that no one would be able to tell what had occurred in the apartment.
Then again, they were presumably not expecting that anyone who would care enough about the human journalist to come looking also happened to have access to state-of-the-art forensics software otherwise reserved for C-SEC and similar agencies and intimate knowledge about their working patterns.
"Jesus fucking christ. This is where you lived for the last six months?" Lancelot whistled from his position by the door where he was making sure no one had followed the two lone specialists. Although they had just been in the company of a squad of biotic soldiers, it really was just the two of them.
While Morneau obviously would've enjoyed nothing more than bringing the BAR troops with him or leading them straight to the FW Headquarters, the uniformed HSA troops couldn't leave the exclusion zone. The moment they did, the HSA's councilor would have a lot of explaining to do and this entire OP would become even more toasted than it already was.
As such, the only support he'd get was Yegor.
Not that the two of them working together was any better from a councilor's perspective.
While HSAIS might not have cared that both of them were playing fast and loose with their missions as long as nothing went sideways, the moment shit hit the fan and they got exposed, things would get messy.
Taking action on the Citadel-proper was off-limits for anyone but C-SEC and the Spectres. So the cardinal rule for any intelligence officer on the station was: don't get caught. As such, the only thing worse than uniformed personal becoming active on the Citadel in an obvious manner was ununiformed personal acting on the Citadel doing it in a clandestine way.
"Yup," Morneau muttered while looking at the depression of someone sitting on the bed. In addition to the shape produced by someone – most likely Wong – sitting down on the blue-cushioned matrass, there was also the square imprint of a terminal or something similarly sized. Just like the journalist, it was missing. Interesting. "Hated every second of it though," he added before drawing a conclusion. They had surprised Wong during work, knocked her out with some gas and then dragged her and her work off while she was unconscious. It certainly explained how they had taken her without her trashing half the place on her way out. She might just be a journalist, but she certainly had a fighting spirit.
"Yeah, I'm sure coming home from a five-figure job and having to live in a luxurious Presidium penthouse with your hot and famous girlfriend with whom you could experience the height of Citadel nightlife was a truly horrific experience," Lancelot responded while Morneau rose back to his feet from where he had kneeled next to the burn mark and narrowed his eyes at the depression on the bed. "You should see the places I've had to crash in while being on this fucking station. You'd definitely appreciate this place more after a night or two far away from the good parts of the recycled air. Trust me. The worst you heard about the wards doesn't come close to how bad it really gets."
"It's a nice place, alright, don't get me wrong," the specialist said while tracing his eyes over what had been his fake-home since October. He took in every corner and every little detail he could see. The motivation here wasn't nostalgia though. He was looking for clues. "But you know how I tick. All this fancy new-rich lifestyle shit and the luxurious penthouse crap just isn't me," he lingered on the holo-picture frame sitting on the nightstand. "Neither's the whole famous girlfriend part or nightlife stuff."
"Damn right it's not. You prefer your walls military-grey, your beds rock-hard, your free time work-oriented and your relationships brief to not-existent. Ain't that right, Magic?" if they hadn't previously swept the place for listening devices, they certainly wouldn't speak this freely. But since the wave had surprisingly enough not bugged the apartments of their employees…
"I'm a simple man, Lancelot," he shrugged before walking over to the holo-frame and starting the procedure of deleting all the pictures saved on it before subsequently deciding that this would take way too long to do properly and opting for the much quicker solution. "What you named is everything I'll ever need," he added before snapping the frame into two, pulling out the memory guard and crushing it with a brief flare of biotics.
"What are you doing?" the other specialist wondered
"Destroying evidence," he said before turning his attention to the terminal he'd used for work. Unlike the frame, this one had practical use as a source of information. As such he powered it down stuffed it into the sling bag Lancelot had borrowed him.
The fact that the screensaver was the same picture as the holoframe he'd just broken didn't help with keeping his mind on his actual mission though.
Wong was probably having the worst day of her life right now, but at least she wasn't dead.
Yet.
While he realized that this was only something positive from the perspective of someone who worked in the kind of working environment he worked in, Morneau was still somewhat relieved to not have walked in on a staged home-invasion murder orchestrated by the Final Wave. And although there was no conclusive sign pointing to the culprit of this home invasion, the specialist was confident that this was the doing of the Final Wave. Who else but the Final Wave (and the sadly deceased Keiji Okuda) would be bold enough to break into an apartment rented out by the Final Wave?
"They definitely have her," Morneau concluded before slapping the back of Lancelot to let him know that they were done here.
"So what's our game plan here?" the other specialist asked while Morneau tossed a small incendiary device into the bedroom and then a few others into the other rooms to ensure that no one else came through here, plucked up his DNA and challenged his already damaged status as a ghost in the system – something that the HSA had taken a lot of effort into maintaining and that the Final Wave could destroy in a single moment. The little disks wouldn't burn down the building or endanger the other occupants. The fire suppression system would kick in prior to that happening and the material these Presidium buildings were built from made it all the more unlikely that he'd actually manage to incinerate anything but the furniture and clothes.
"Originally I was gonna pass up on handing in my resignation personally. But since the Wave kind of forced my hand," he stated.
"You're gonna cause a major incident and pay your boss a good-bye visit?" Lancelot figured as they walked out of the apartment and Morneau detonated the small charges.
"Something like that," he responded before logging himself into the security network of the penthouse and deleting every second that had been recorded ever since they'd shown up. With this being a privately owned place and him being the technical owner, this wasn't something beyond his skill-level.
"Magic, Wong's not your mission," Lancelot pointed out. "If she's taken hostage, well yeah, that sucks for her. But it still isn't our problem."
"I know," Morneau responded while they stepped into the elevator, which seemed to work despite the fire alarm kicking off. Interesting fire-hazard measures. "Officially, I'm doing this because Aganian's a loose end. Wong's got nothing to do with this."
"And unofficially?"
"Targets of opportunity. Right now there's a chance we can still figure out where she's going. I mean they took her for a reason. Don't you wanna know why?" he left out the part where a nagging voice told him that he at least had to try to look for Wong in the headquarters, even if there was just a one percent chance of her actually being there.
"I don't wanna know anything about any of that. I'm not even part of this assignment," Lancelot retorted.
"Yet here you are, committing arson alongside me," Morneau responded. "Don't tell me you actually want to skip out on something like kicking down the Wave's front door and teaching them a lesson that'll stick." While he had no doubt that it – or the Final Wave as a matter of fact - wouldn't stick around long now that they had made a move on a Council member's Presidium dock, he still found the idea appealing.
"Hold up. Didn't you just say you only wanted to find out why they took Wong?"
"Freudian slip, I guess," he chuckled before the elevator binged to the ground floor and they casually walked out while the inhabitants of the buildings collected outside the building due to the fire alarm.
"You're compromised, Magic," Lancelot argued.
Maybe he was.
Probably, actually.
Speaking from the perspective of his actual mission – hunting down the Shadow Broker- there was no need to go the HQ of the Final Wave. If he wanted to, he could just pack his bag, board the next best HSA ship and be off.
Leaving now was the simple and the right decision.
But if he did that, he'd not only lose any opportunity to follow Wong's trail – even if he knew that she wouldn't be anywhere near the HQ, the place was still the most likely location to find out why she'd been taken –he'd also waste the opportunity to squeeze some more information out of the Final Wave.
He had everything he needed to stop the Broker.
But he was still itching to pull the whole PGI-strand that he had uncovered. Doubly so now that they had tried to ice Shepard.
He sure as hell hadn't ripped the N7 from the Collector's bug-clutches only so some shady organization could try to whack her a month down the line.
"Like I said. Think of it as a target of opportunity."
"You said that already. Still kind of tastes compromised to me. 'Walk the line but never cross it'. Remember?"
"Come on, man. You and me and one good ass kicking. For old times' sake," he replied to Lancelot's acquisition.
"You're only saying this because you need me to stand guard while you interrogate your boss, aren't you?"
"Depends. You still have that shotgun of yours?"
Lancelot let out a sigh.
"Fine. One ass kicking for old times' sake. Still the assault rifle type, aren't you?"
Morneau cracked a smile.
"And to think I thought you turned boring with all this time on the Citadel."
Now Lancelot put up a faked hurt expression.
"You thought what?"
Twenty Minutes Later, 20. April 2417 AD, Citadel, Presidium, Final Wave Headquarters
After leaving the apartment behind, the two specialists had headed to the embassy and Morneau had let Lancelot in on the fact that in addition to satisfying his curiosity about the why of Wong's abduction, he also wanted to get to the ground of PGI. And even though his colleague had been skeptical of Morneau's optimism, Lancelot had agreed that they would not get a better opportunity – or cover story as a matter of fact- than having the disgruntled Solomon Gunn walk into his old office to get some dirt on PGI.
Hence, here they were.
"Business hours are over, so it'll only be a bunch of workaholics and some security guards who didn't make the cut to actual field operatives," Morneau advised as he and Lancelot looked at building in front of them. They were now clad in the least conspicuous overalls they had been able to find during their brief stay at the embassy and had packed their guns into specifically shielded bags that wouldn't trigger the Presidium's hundreds of security sensors. Additionally, they had used the brief stay at the HSA's central of power on the Citadel to pick up light armor, just in case his plan bombed and they got into a shoot-out.
While they had no doubt that their little intervention here would draw C-SEC's attention, their brief visit to the embassy had also included making sure that the excellent response time of C-SEC would be dulled by a few minutes thanks to Captain Bailey – a C-SEC officer who for some reason Morneau didn't want to know was in Lancelot's pocket.
Naturally, the human C-SEC officer hadn't been told any details. After being reminded of whatever blackmail Lancelot had on him, his colleague had advised the officer to treat any incoming calls from the address of the Wave's headquarters as nothing but an 'alarm system gone haywire'. That combined with the large-scale call they had already produced earlier would buy them more than enough time to be in and out without running the risk of getting put into a holding cell alongside the people who'd just tried to kill them.
Well. At least as long as they managed to keep the outward exposure of their raid small. When shit started to blow up, the specialist doubted Bailey could delay the inevitable, blackmail or not.
To make sure that the exposure stayed small, Morneau and Lancelot had come up with a plan that was as simple as it was brilliant.
Okay.
In reality, only Morneau had come up with it and it was actually quite stupid and had a decent chance of ending with them gunning down the unlucky security personal that decided to get in their way because they didn't buy their bullshit-story.
Either way.
Setting aside how many holes their plan had, it was the best they could do. And while he realized that he'd been using this exact excuse very often recently, this time it was actually true. There was just no easy way in.
Lancelot had proposed simply using the IDs of the captured mercs, but Morneau had been forced to point out that all identification used by the Final Wave was tied to the biometric scanner. They'd be made the moment the system realized they weren't asari, salarian or turian – which would be immediately – and then it'd be guns-blazing right from the get-go.
Therefore, they had to improvise their way in, which luckily for them, wouldn't be as hard as usual.
Morneau had used a lot of his time at work to collect information that could help him escape – or infiltrate- his workplace if it ever came to that. As such he was deeply familiar with the inner workings of the headquarters. He was aware that a visitor's pass was all that was needed to evade the biometrics scanners that covered the entire place and he knew that the bored asari who managed the visitor register was also particularly bad at noting down when handyman showed up. Similarly, Morneau knew that when he'd earlier left today, it had been the unmotivated human guard at the front desk. He was an older bloke who hated working longer hours than the field operatives or all the other 'useful' personal. Because of this, he tended to just wave everyone who looked like they had work to do inside without checking anything other than said poorly managed visitor register. He generally only seemed to hold on to this job because it paid a Presidium wage that made him rich in the wards. In short, not exactly the most scrutinous guard. Hence, if they managed to be convincing enough, they might just be able to play the part of the maintenance workers who needed to do urgent work on some crucial part of the office's infrastructure but had somehow not gotten registered by the system.
To make the lie even more convincing, Morneau had even used some of the saved files on his terminal to produce a half-way official looking invitation sent from a Final Wave source.
Granted, said source was the company ID of Solomon Gunn – someone he had no doubt was already officially listed as rogue or dead depending on what Aganian was making of the absence of his operatives and also had no business inviting maintenance personal– but it was still better than just walking in. If the checking habits of the guards were as superficial as he hoped, it might just work.
And if it didn't…. well.
Let's just say that he was confident that between the two of them, Lancelot and him could overpower whoever was guarding the office this evening and that the Final Wave was certainly not expecting Soloman Gunn to have the guts (or the lack of common sense) to just straight up walk in through their front door less than an hour after they tried to have him killed.
He gave one last look towards the building and then shared a nod with Lancelot. They were doing this now. He pulled on the dark-blue hat in an effort to reduce his chances of being immediately recognized and then fell in step behind Lancelot. The blonde man would do the talking simply because unlike Morneau, he hadn't greeted the guard every single morning of the week.
With both of them having fourteen years of experience to fall back on – three in training and eleven in practice-, neither of the specialists had any trouble with slipping into the role of 'bland maintenance guy x doing mundane task y'. They strolled into the lobby of the headquarters with their bags in hand and walked up to the security desk with the forged entry papers as if they weren't just trying to sneak into a building belonging to a group of people who were looking to kill Morneau.
"Evening," his colleague greeted as they came to a halt in front of the desk where the guard, a human in his fifties or sixties, who'd already resigned himself to reading something on his omni-tool.
"Evenin'," the guard responded before sitting up straight and glancing at the tablet Lancelot was holding. "Something on there that I can help you with?" he asked.
"Yes, actually. We're supposed to do maintenance on Level 7," Lancelot responded before handing him the tablet. "Something about the air conditioning being busted again."
The guard threw him a squinted look, most likely because Lancelot had interrupted him during his me-time, and then glanced at Morneau, who was doing his best to look at anything but his face. Next he snatched the tablet out of Lancelot's hands and flew over its contents for all of two seconds. Afterwards he scrolled through the terminal behind his desk.
"Your invitation's legit," it wasn't, "but you aren't on the visitor list, so no Bueno for you, sorry," he shot them down before once more looking at Morneau, who had now opted to faking a long yawn to conceal his face.
"Seriously? This again?" Lancelot responded with a sigh, aiming to draw the guard's attention back to him. Then he leaned on the high lobby desk that divided them. It was a stylish piece of black stone decorated with the Wave's three-pronged red star. From what Morneau had been told, the thing was apparently carved out of a chunk of granite straight from Rannoch – the birthplace of the Wave's infamy. "I swear to god, this happens every time I get a call to your place. When I talk to your guy, it's urgent as hell and then I get here, no one wants to know anything about calling me in. Four times. That's how often I've had this conversation with your coworkers," he said with clear annoyance.
"Hah. Yeah. They'll do you like that in this place. First they say it's easy hours and next thing you know, you work a week worth of night rotation," the human guard complained before tilting his head and addressing Morneau. "Hey, do I know you from somewhere?"
So much for laying low.
He scratched himself above the eye and went back to the ARA-metropolis-accent he'd been told to drop during his first year at Grissom and hadn't managed to fully kick right until the last one.
"Probably. I fix things around here all the time. Your folks break stuff a lot. Especially those guys on the ops level," he responded from personal experience. In the seven months he'd been working there as Solomon Gunn, not two weeks had passed without some kind of high-tech product breaking down due to negligence, ill-treatment or bad luck.
Judging from the guard's look, he seemed to buy Morneau's lie. Sure, he'd given a convincing explanation. But the fact that the specialist had an everyman face and that his current apparel lacked Solomon Gunn's usual sense of style, probably helped too.
"And let me guess, half the time they forget to put you on the visitor list too," Lancelot added while shaking his head and lifting his bag.
"Oui, mon ami," he responded with his Earthern tune and mother tongue. He disliked using it because it put his heritage on display for anyone with half an ear for accents and as such could be used to identify him. Additionally, he also kind of hated it because it brought him back to when he'd been nothing but a weak, twelve-year old orphan making it from one day to the next one thanks to the grace of having somehow ended up in a state-run orphanage in the Auvergne and not in one of the much worse alternatives further in the megacity core.
But that was hardly a line of thought worth pursuing now.
Those times and that person were long gone.
"Listen, man, I know it's not your job, but can't you do us a solid one and see that we didn't come here for nothing?"
"If you aren't in the register, I can't let you in," the guard responded, prompting Morneau to sling his bag in position for an easy draw.
But unlike him, Lancelot wasn't done negotiating.
"I get that. But come on. You know how bosses are. If we tell him that we came here and then got sent home again, he's gonna rip us a new one. No way he'll believe it when I tell him that the freaking Final Wave blundered on their visitor list."
The consideration on the human's face was clear.
"Can I see that again?" he asked, pointing at the tablet.
"Sure thing," Lancelot responded. Unbeknownst to the guard, he was now reaching for the gun in his back and concealing the move by standing close to the black lobby desk. He didn't say it, but he was trusting that Morneau was also positioning himself in a favorable way right now, which of course he was doing. While the guard was ignorant of it, they now had him flanked on two sides. Field-ops 101.
"You know what, I actually know that Gunn guy who called you here," the guard muttered in an indistinct tone that could mean that they were either busted or that everything was still in the clear. There certainly were specialists who'd need nothing but this little clue to ice the poor bloke – which was certainly justifiable in one way or another. But the fact that both of them had agreed to avoid a shoot-out as long as possible kept both their hands off their guns. "One of the few decent suits walking around this place is you ask me," Morneau kept himself from laughing. He was only saying that because he had no idea of half the crap the Final Wave had pulled thanks to 'Solomon Gunn's' knack for covert activities. "Figure if I don't let you in, he's gonna be in a world of trouble too," the guard reached for two of the visitor passes and placed them on the black granite desk. "So just make sure you dial the air conditioning way up when you're done. The more tropical, the preferable. If you put that thing to human temperatures, everyone on that floor is gonna bitch about how cold it suddenly got overnight," as soon as the words had left his mouth, Lancelot visibly zipped his bag again to not trigger any security alarms.
"Tropical temperatures. Got it," Lancelot said before grabbing the passes and tossing one to Morneau. "We owe you one, man," the blonde specialist added after they had crossed the security zone without kicking of a blaring alarm.
"Ah what the hell. Just bring me a coffee or something whenever you're around again."
The two specialists said their friendly goodbies and carried their bags to the elevator, Once inside, Morneau punched the button for the seventh floor. As soon as the doors pulled close, they both unzipped their bags in anticipation. While the guns would remain inside, their draw time had now been drastically reduced. Since the only sensors checking for weapons were the ones in the entry area – this was due to the fact that a lot of the operational Wave personal was carrying their guns whenever they were on the job, despite the Citadel being a place where the concealed carrying of a gun was forbidden in both public and private environments – the risk of being detected now was also removed from the equation.
"Any last second advice on your boss?" Lancelot muttered next to him.
"I told you he used to run with the Cabals, right?"
"Yeah. Read it in his file too," Lancelot said, nonchalantly telling Morneau that he'd clearly had kept track of his mission if he was reading the dossiers of the people Gunn had worked with. "Anything else?"
"Aganian's kinda greenish. If shit hits the fan, try not to hit anything that looks green or spikey," Morneau advised before realizing that Lancelot probably knew that as well. "He keeps a gun in his desk. Cabal-style Carnifex. Short muzzle, extended capacity," he'd only seen it once, but that had been more than enough time to recognize the weapon. After all, half the people who'd trained his class at Grissom had been turians with that exact sidearm.
"No shooting the green biotic skullface unless he goes for his desk-gun. Roger that," the Horizon-born specialist replied.
While others might have found it jarring that he'd use that precise slang to describe a turian, Morneau had gotten used to some of Lancelot's stranger mannerisms and opinions about halfway through the advanced Urban Survival Training back on Eden Prime. As far as Horizoners went, he was surprisingly easy-going and unaffected by IFS crap, especially for someone who'd grown up during the post-Fringe War occupation and 'reorganization' of Horizon – a planet that had been witness to the single most destructive battle of the Fringe Wars with a death toll bordering on ninety million; the fittingly-named Siege of Horizon.
Then again, if he wasn't a surprisingly easy-going and unaffected-by-Iffy-Crap Horizoner, he probably wouldn't have gotten this job to begin with.
The exact mechanisms of Section 13's recruitment pattern were still a mystery to him after fourteen years of being a part of Section 13. But Morneau was certain that at least ninety percent of the two point two billion Horizoners would never even be considered for this position based simply on the fact that either they or their parents had actively fought the HSA. Although come to think of it, Lancelot had definitely mentioned that his mom had in fact fought during the invasion. And not just as a militia member either. From what he remembered she'd been IFSDF… he just couldn't remember if Lancelot had said that she'd fought inside of a Paladin or only maintained one…
Morneau registered that they had just passed level five of seven and emptied his mind of these distracting and ultimately unimportant thoughts. He put in his ear-protection, which he'd hope they wouldn't need, and pulled in steady breaths to slow his heartbeat. From here on out, only Aganian mattered. Next to him, Lancelot did the same thing.
He put himself into the corner of the elevator so that when the door opened, he'd at least be half-concealed in case they got attacked immediately, which wasn't very unlikely considering the people working here would most definitely recognize him. On the other side of the elevator door, Lancelot once more did the same thing. Not a second later, the door pulled open and they were greeted by the sight of an asari with her head turned towards them.
That would be Janera; former huntress turned Final Wave contractor.
It took Morneau exactly a second to register that she immediately knew what was happening.
Purple ripples appeared on the asari's skin just as much as they materialized in Morneau's hand. While she wanted to smash them to bits with a quick, weaker-than-ususal shockwave, the small barrier Morneau managed to produce was enough to distort the powerful ripple and buy Lancelot enough time to fire off his weapon. While the M77 was an IFS relict of the Fringe Wars and definitely lacked the fancy mass accelerator technology or the hybrid weaponry that the HSA had adopted since, the fact that it fired an armor-piercing slug that could punch through just about any suit of armor instead of the small pellets that mass accelerator shotguns used to overload barriers more than made up for the technological gap or its questionable heritage.
An ear-deafening crack rang through the office and sent the asari flying right until she hit the wall next to Aganian's door. While her barriers had managed to stop the lethality of the hit, the force and impact still knocked her out.
Morneau pulled his Valkyrie from the bag and stepped out of the elevator just as the security system registered what had happened and a blaring alarm started to sound of. He was glad that he could still hear it, actually. Despite the ear-pro the M74 had rang his ears pretty badly just now.
After scanning the office for a second, he turned to Lancelot.
"Sweep the place and keep your eyes on the elevator, I'll handle Aganian!" he yelled, trying to hear himself over the ringing.
"Copy that!" Lancelot replied, presumably also with a shout. While the other specialist hit the emergency stop on the elevator and went about to secure the office, Morneau hurried to Aganian's door and kicked it in with the help of a little biotics. Then he entered the office and leveled his weapon at the turian just in time for the ringing of the M77 to stop.
"Good you're still here. This whole thing would've been really awkward and pointless if you'd gone home already," he said as soon as he came face to face with the turian. He was in the process of searching his desk but he still looked suprrise.
"Listen Gunn. If this is about the hit… I'm sure we can talk this out," Aganian started. He was trying to stall, and Morneau had no patience for it. He discharged his Valykrie into the wall next to the turian's head and shattered his glass case.
"Your hands in the air or a hole in your head. Your choice," he offered, prompting Aganian to freeze. "And don't you make me count," he added. The turian's hands slowly came into the air, empty of any guns.
"What do you want, Gunn?"
"For starters, I want you to turn of the alarm and call it in as false," he demanded before nodding his head to the left and instructing Aganian to step away from the desk where the gun was kept.
"And why would I do that?" the turian responded while slowly obliging. "As long as this thing's ringing, you are working on borrowed time. I'd have to be an idiot to turn it off."
"That so? Who do you figure's faster? C-Sec responding to your alarm or me pulling the trigger because you're not doing what I tell you to?" the specialist retorted.
"We both know that's an empty threat. If you wanted to kill me, you already would've done it," Aganian responded before plopping down in a chair away from his desk and bringing up his omni-tool. "But since I'm assuming that the odds of my survival are going to sink drastically if this doesn't go like you plan it to," he continued before the alarm stopped. "I might as well go along with it. The sound's annoying anyways."
"Smart move," Morneau replied.
"Well, I didn't get here by being stupid," the green-plated turian shrugged before gesturing for the chair in the opposite end of the room. "There's no reason we can't be civilized about this, Gunn. Sit. Talk."
"I'd much rather stand, if you don't mind," Morneau responded, his sights squarely on Aganian's head. He'd have to be an idiot to sit down away from the door and turn himself into an easy target for a turian cabal with the home advantage. He might've been retired for years by now, but that didn't make Aganian any less dangerous if he tried his luck.
"As I'm sure you know, you can do whatever you want as long as you're the one behind the trigger. Speaking of triggers. That's a very interesting gun you've got there," Aganian responded while looking at the Valkyrie. "I mean I obviously got some idea of where you managed to procure HSA military gear and why you appear to be a biotic despite never telling any of us," he leaned back in his chair and folded his hands on his lap. "But talking about you is not why we're here, is it?"
"No, it isn't."
"What do you want?"
"A couple of things. Let's start with why you bagged the journalist and her work."
"Because someone paid us to?" Aganian responded before the hint of a smug grin appeared on his face. "In all seriousness though, you know what my department does. We're fixers. If we took her, it's because she pissed off someone powerful."
"Who?"
"Client confidentiality, I'm afraid."
Morneau narrowed his eyes and glanced at the picture on Aganian's desk.
"If that's the only answer you're giving me, I hope your last conversation with your kids was a nice one. I'd hate for them to remember their last talk with their dad being about him telling them to take out the trash more often or something along those lines."
The smug grin vanished and he turned serious again. For some reason, his comment on Aganian's kids had hit even harder than he'd aimed for.
Not that he was complaining.
"If you shoot me, there won't be a place in the galaxy left for you to hide from the Wave. No matter who you work for, we'll find you and we'll put you down."
"I think you grossly overestimate the Wave's reach and your importance," Morneau responded before making sure that Aganian could see his finger slip against the trigger. "I'll tell you the same thing I told your hit-squad. Money isn't worth dying for. Especially not if you've got a family depending on you. Think long and hard about your next words. If you don't give me anything useful, there's no reason why I should keep you alive." Given the turian's past reaction, he was now putting his faith in the family angle.
Aganian turned silent for a second and then gestured for the bottle on his desk. "May I?"
Morneau eyed it for a second. Being a cabal, Aganian could turn that little thing into a deadly projectile. But being biotic himself, Morneau could defend against it. Probably at least.
Either way, if it got him talking, it was worth the risk.
"Knock yourself out."
The turian stood up from his desk, grabbed the bottle and immediately gulped down on its contents. When he was done with the remaining half of the bottle, he let out a breath and let it fall to ground where it shattered and joined the glass shards of the wall case.
"The same people who talked the Wave into killing you wanted Wong gone. Don't ask me how she did it, but somehow that girlfriend of yours got dangerously close to finding out something about our business partners that they'd rather not have become public," Morneau controlled his surprise. He'd obviously known that Wong had been working on something, but he hadn't figured that it was something so substantial.
"Who are these people?"
"One I'm sure you're already acquainted with. The Shadow Broker," Aganian said before dropping back in his chair. "The other, you might remember from that one time at my office or from Hock's little celebration, which by the way, I know you crashed," he said with a slight lull. "Project Group Insight."
And there it was.
The strand he wanted to pull on.
"Who are they?"
"I know you won't believe me when I say this, but I don't have a fucking clue," the turian chuckled. "All I can tell you is that they pay ridiculously good for basic jobs and that they somehow managed to form a mutually beneficial partnership with the Shadow Broker, who by the way, really wants you dead. Matter of fact, he actually blackmailed me into acting against you before management ever told me to do it. Said that if I don't whack you by today, he'll kill my daughter," there was a clear desperation in Aganian's tone and he believed the turian that he didn't know anything about this mysterious project group. Additionally, he now understood why his comments had hit as hard as they had.
The threat to his family wasn't just an abstract danger.
It was a real, tangible danger.
He could exploit that
"Which one?" Morneau asked with as much sympathy as he could muster.
"The one currently training on Digeris. If I don't give the Broker your head, he's going to have Karia killed. All because you just couldn't help but mess with the wrong people," he sighed.
Morneau considered his next words carefully.
"I might be able to do something about that if you lend me a hand," he said, immediately drawing Aganian's full focus. It was a common technique. Quid pro quo. Provide a solution to the person's problem so that they would be motivated to help you in turn.
"What do you mean?"
"The Broker wants me dead. I want him dead. If he gets his will, I'm gone and he can keep blackmailing you with your daughter's life. But if I win, say because you gave me details on his security and tell me where Wong is, well… let's just say I'm not looking to pick up where he'll leave off," he reasoned before offering a suggestion for Aganian to take. "The way I see it, the choice's easy. You either keep getting blackmailed by him now that he's got a hold your weakness," that was the reality of how this would go if the Broker remained alive. Even if Aganian complied, the requests would never stop, "or help me and sleep easy knowing that your daughter's gonna be as save as a turian her age can be."
"See, now you're just lying to me. No one kills the Broker unless they want to be the next Broker. If I help you kill him, you or whoever hired you is just going to step into his place and keep doing what he does. That's the way it's always been," Aganian stated. "So the way I see it, the choice isn't actually easy. It's nonconsequential. I either sell the Broker out to you and risk him killing Karia as a punishment if you fail or I help you and risk you killing her to spite me when you win. Either way, her life's in danger," Aganian responded before a shout came from outside the office.
"Clear!" Lancelot's disembodied voice declared.
"Copy!" Morneau responded before looking at the turian.
"Got yourself some help for the job, didn't you?" the turian registered.
"Contrary to what you might believe, I never liked working alone," he responded. "Aganian, whoever you think I am, trust me, I'm not. This isn't about power, revenge or money or becoming the next Shadow Broker. This is about stopping what he does and permanently ending the threat he presents," that was what his mission briefing had read and it was pretty much taken straight from the mission statement of Task Force Light Bringer, the subsection Cerberus that had helped HSAIS track down the Shadow Broker. "When I'm done, there won't be a Broker left to blackmail you and whatever info he's got on your kid is gonna burn down alongside the rest of his network. You have my word on that."
"You say all of that noble shit, yet I know exactly what you are and why you're doing this," Aganian replied. "I was a cabal for fifteen years, a Cirpritine cop for four and a merc for sixteen. Trust me. I know a killer when I'm looking at one," he glanced at the shattered glass on the floor and got to his feet. "People like you and me," he wanted to interrupt and say that he was nothing like Aganian who had sold his soul for a paycheck, but he didn't, "we do what we do because we're good at it and because we like it. Giving in to our own nature. That's all it is. Everything else we tell ourselves, all the excuses and justifications and reasons we give for what we do, it's all just for show. It doesn't matter if its noble motives or money or power. We always find something to justify the next mission or the next war. All for the sake of keeping up the fight," he gestured for the tablet on his desk and Morneau nodded while his own words from back on Bekenstein rang through his mind.
Each man delights in the work that suits him best.
"If that's your view on me, I can't change it," Morneau responded, again choosing his words carefully. Convincing people was a science in and of itself and navigating through a conversation to reach the desired location took a lot of work, a lot of empathy and a lot of attention for details. Luckily for him, he'd gotten kind of good at those over the years. "But since you claim to understand me to such a degree, I think somewhere deep down, you know that I'm not lying to you. When I say that there won't be anyone left to blackmail you when I'm done, I mean it. This is the fight I picked and I'm finishing it all the way."
"You really believe that the people in charge of you won't try to pick up the Broker's network?"
"Absolutely," he lied. Of course the HSA wanted the Broker's network. Securing it for the sake of rooting out all the Broker's other criminal associates and possible moles was half his mission.
"How very naïve."
"I prefer idealistic," that part was true but only in the way that he liked to think that the HSA wouldn't abuse the information the way the Shadow Broker did.
"As I've come to learn, they are one and the same," Aganian sighed while unlocking the tablet, "Like I said, I can't give you anything on PGI other than what they paid us for. But I can give you the Shadow Broker. Manpower. Assignments. Gear. His entire security roster is all here because it's all us. This is everything you need to kill him."
"And Wong?" he asked before catching the tablet that Aganian had tossed towards him.
"You're going to love this," Aganian suddenly chuckled. "Your girlfriend is on her way to his ship. PGI wanted her delivered to the Broker for interogation. He's hiding it in-"
"The Sowilo System. Thanks, but I knew that part already," Morneau responded before stuffing the tablet into a large pocket of his coverall. He had what he came for. Everything else was just bonus information.
"I take it that was what the trip to Bekenstein was for?" Aganian figured.
"If it's any consolation, Hock cracked a whole lot easier than you," he replied before starting his retreat. This had taken way too long already anyways.
"Let me guess, the shot next to his head was all it took?"
"Pretty much, yeah," Morneau responded before walking towards the door.
"If he talked, why'd you kill him?"
Morneau lowered his rifle ever so slightly after giving the asari by the door a kick to check if she was faking unconsciousness to avoid getting blasted by Lancelot again, who was standing just out of sight with his M77 trained to her head.
"I wasn't the one who pulled the trigger."
"Then who did?"
"A dead man who bled out next to Hock. Guess I'm not as much of a killer as you think I am," he replied, spotting the brief surprise on Aganian's face. "Word of advice, Aganian. If I were you, I'd hand in my retirement papers and move my family off the Citadel before C-SEC raids this place and you spent the rest of your life in jail or something worse happens," the Reapers, for example.
"I take it that means we're part of your fight as well?" Aganian responded while Morneau inched back towards the elevator.
"The Broker, those PGI guys, you," he listed before he and Lancelot stepped into the elevator. "You're all part of the same rotten structure I was sent to burn down. And like I said, I finish my fights."
"The Wave has endured way worse than you," the turian, who had walked to his office door and knelt down next to the asari by now, muttered. "No matter what you do, we're here to stay. One way or another."
Morneau lowered his rifle and didn't give a reply.
He could appreciate the mindset.
But soon enough mindsets wouldn't matter.
The Reapers would hit this place eventually and everyone in their path would die unless someone stopped them.
All the more reason to end this charade.
Nine Hours Later, 21. April 2417 AD, HSASV Scott, Enroute to the Sowil System
After leaving the Final Wave headquarters, parting ways with Lancelot and hitching a ride on the Scott, a new heavy cruiser and namesake of the Scott-line of Heavy HSA cruisers - which had been named after Terra Nova's capital city – Morneau had officially been cleared of Gunn's persona and all related undercover protocols and been given permission to dig into the intel provided by Aganian.
Like the former cabal had said, there wasn't a lot of information on PGI. Just that they regularly paid to disappear people who were becoming 'troublesome' and that their business relation with the Shadow Broker was unusually well-balanced. Normally the Broker didn't like doing business with equals. PGI was the exception.
Setting them aside, the information Aganian had provided on the Broker's security – which seemed to be legitimately made up of nothing but Final Wave contractors – was worth gold. He'd already forwarded it to the BAR officers that were accompanying him on the Scott and from what their commander had told him, it would help with reducing casualties among the biotic shock troops.
Additionally to sharing with the BAR commanders, Morneau had also forwarded a copy to HSAIS and briefly updated them on his progress and plan of action – personally for the first time in 201 days.
While that had been a big deal for him, the intel officer on the other end hadn't recognized the significance of this occasion and only told him to 'proceed as planned'. This of course meant that he was still supposed to try and secure as much of the Broker's network as possible and at least give the yahg a chance to peacefully enter captivity instead of immediately blowing his brain out.
And although Morneau doubted it would come to that, he'd agreed.
Orders were orders and while he had played fast and loose to get to this point, he hoped to be done with that by now.
"You got a minute, Specialist?" a voice suddenly called from the now opened door of the officer quarter he'd been temporarily granted for the sake of privacy. He looked up at the sound and recognized the dark-skinned marine standing in the doorway as the commander of the BAR troops on the Scott; Captain Issa Furaha.
Unbeknownst to said marine, Morneau recognized her from Grissom Academy. Furaha had been part of the first ever graduation class of human biotics in 2400. She had departed the academy three years after Morneau had arrived in 2397; another three years before that fateful day when Redford had shown up on Terra Nova.
And while he'd obviously like to claim that he knew her because she, alongside the rest of the graduation class had been shining examples for the subsequent classes, the truth was a lot more embarrassing and a lot more in line with what male teenage locked up in a military boarding school next to a basaltic desert far removed from any normal girls their age would've done.
When the faces and names of the first graduation class had been published and honored within Grissom Academy, he and the other equally immature boys from his class had rated the slightly older girls based on their appearance and Issa Furaha had been his 'top pick'…
So yeah.
Since that was not exactly the best conversation starter, he'd refrained from mentioning it to her.
"Sure thing, Captain. How can I help?" he responded before running a hand through his very recently cut hair. As soon as he'd found the time, he'd searched for the Scott's barber and told him to turn Gunn's relatively long hair back into a short, military-reg crew cut that didn't bother him. While he was sure he could've done one more op with that haircut and used those fifteen minutes far more productively, getting rid of Gunn's styled hairdo and shaving off the stubbly beard had buried the persona for good.
"The Scott's captain sent me to fetch you. You've got an incoming call waiting for you in his quarters."
Morneau locked the tablet on which he'd been reading about the Shadow Broker's security measures for the fifth time and jumped to his feet.
"His quarters?" that could only mean the person calling him was using the Scott's secure line. Considering how few people could just up and dial the secure line of an HSA warship, he had a feeling that this wasn't a pleasure call or another debrief with some random intelligence officer.
"That's what he said," Furaha responded before Morneau followed her out of the door and towards the captain's private quarters. "Say, specialist, can you answer personal questions?" the marine suddenly asked after a minute or so of silence, seemingly out of the blue.
"Depends on the question," Morneau replied earnestly before shooting her a friendly smile and waiting.
Furaha replied with a slight smirk of her own and then pointed at her own neck.
"That scar on your neck," she said while tapping a similar mark underneath her dark hair, immediately telling Morneau where this was going. "You're a first gen too, aren't you?"
As soon as she'd said it, Morneau once more felt the small device implanted in him. It was kind of like being told to breathe or swallow, you were always doing it subconsciously but as soon as you were reminded of it, it suddenly became a chore.
"Yup. Barely, though. We were the last class to get the L1s," the specialist replied while they walked through the Scott's hallways and dodged various crewmembers, marines and pilots all going about their own duties.
Damn.
It was good to be back in a familiar setting.
"Not a lot of L1ers going around these days, at least compared to the two-ers and those third-gens from the Ascension Program. From what I heard, we never made it past four hundred before getting replaced by the second generation," she added somewhat sadly. "Last I checked, there were only two-hundred something l1ers left in active duty. Whole bunch of us bought it during the Blitz. Some of the smarter ones got out after their twelve," the Captain stated. "I'm shit at names and faces, so I'll just ask directly to get the nagging of my chest," Furaha went on before sizing him up as if the unmarked marine BDU he was wearing would reveal anything about him. "Do we know each other?"
Morneau mirrored her action and answered with a shrug. "I know you, but I don't think you ever heard of me. I got inaugurated in 2397 so I was around when the first class get sent off."
"Class 2397?"
"Yup."
"Meaning you graduated in 2403," the Captain concluded falsely. "HSAIS plucked you out of BAR, didn't they?"
"No, not exactly," he responded with a friendly chuckle, if only to disguise the fact that HSAIS's elite field operatives were partially recruited out of school. That'd be one hell of a headline, wouldn't it? "Although I gotta admit that I never had anything to do with BAR."
"You don't strike me as the type of guy who'd flunk selection or get into disciplinary trouble," Furaha figured. "I take it that means you got a different career offered and HSAIS plucked you from there?"
"You could say that," if he hadn't buggered of to Cronos Station, he probably would've ended up on the ASOC FastTrack. Or at least that's how things had looked when he had left.
"Could?" the officer raised an eyebrow.
"I'm afraid my exact walk of life is classified, Captain."
"Aha. Got it," Furaha nodded. "BAR or not. I just wanted to say that it's always nice to see another first gen. Especially if they're still alive and still kicking dirt. You and me? We're old-timers, especially to those Ascension Program kids that make up half my company," she extended her hand. While Morneau had to admit that it was strange to hear her describe the two of them as old-timers - he wasn't even thirty-two and Furaha didn't look a day over thirty-five either- he had to admit that there was probably a lot of truth to what Furaha was saying. Not that he'd ever be able to relate completely. Other than having attended Grissom's military curriculum, he hadn't had any contact with the HSA's biotic forces.
Still, he shook her hand.
"All the more reason to show them that biotics age like fine wine," he replied with a chuckle before noticing how surprisingly tightly Furaha was clasping the hand.
"Indeed," the biotic officer responded before she put on a serious expression. "Before you take that call, there's also a professional request I need you to hear. You might as well consider it a favor form one L1er to another."
He had a faint idea of where this was going.
"I'm all ears, Captain," Morneau responded with a serious look of his own.
"Section 13 has a strange rep with marines like me. Word is, we start dying in droves whenever you show up but still half of us want to be exactly like you," she stated. While it probably could be taken as a compliment, Furaha's tune made it clear that it wasn't. "My guys aren't exactly green. We've had a few squabbles here and there and they obviously went the full nine yards of Grissom and BAR training. But except for the few L1ers and L2ers who've been with me since before the Blitz, the troopers under my command really are kids. Twenty-one. Twenty. Nineteen. You know, the impressionable age where you still think you're invincible and believe that machine gun's gonna hit everyone but you," she took a brief pause and looked Morneau straight in the eyes with a stern look.
"Yeah, I can relate," he responded, neglecting to mention how long he had had that exact problem.
"Good. So you also know that if they catch sight of you during the battle or end up covering your six, they're gonna want to impress the big, badass Section 13 operative. To them, you're kind of like a superstar, so they'll do what they see you doing even when they've got no idea why you're doing it," she frowned. "If that happens, slow down for a sec and make sure they don't get themselves killed trying to imitate you, alright? I've got no trouble believing that every risk you take is calculated, no matter how crazy it might seem," yeah right. Everything he did was a calculated risk. No luck involved whatsoever… "But I also know that my guys don't exactly have your training or your experience," or more accurately, his luck, "What's possible for you is deadly for them and I don't want to start burying third-gens in droves. Writing those letters sucks no matter what, but it gets even worse when you're doing it for people born around eighteen years ago."
For a split-second, Morneau was back on Akuze and watching a squad of hardened marines get torn apart by husks in an attempt to assist with a Section 13 assignment. His training hadn't exactly made a difference back then now, had it?
Then he was once more looking at Captain Furaha's dark eyes.
"I'm not going to endanger your men, Captain," at least not more than he had to. Obviously the BAR troopers would have to be put into some kind of danger. That was the very nature of fighting. "You've got my word on that," he added before opting for a soft finish using his favorited reflection technique. "One old-timer to another," a disarming smile crossed his face and Furaha mirrored it on her own before letting go of his hand, effectively telling him that her worries were quelled, and that the situation was handled. Good.
"I'm glad to hear it," the BAR officer responded. "You know, if you want to, you can join me and the other officers for some drinks when you're done here. I'm sure they'll appreciate the chance to get to know you before the official briefing. They're mostly L1ers too, so who knows, you might run into a familiar face or two," Furaha went on. While the prospect of getting hammered in the officer's lounge with Furaha would've definitely been a fantasy come true for 15-year-old Daniel Morneau, nearly 32-year-old Callsign Magic had matured a little since then, if only by a small margin.
In addition to not drinking outside of assignments, he knew better than to risk running into familiar faces.
Those just opened up questions he couldn't – or wouldn't – answer.
"I appreciate the offer, but I'm afraid this is going to take a while and when it's done, all I'll wanna do is fall face first into my rack," he pointed at the captain's quarters, even if he had no idea how long the conversation would actually take.
"That's perfectly understandable. From what I heard, you had quite the day," Furaha retorted. "But if you find yourself with some free time after all, the offer stands. Like I said. My platoon leaders would love the chance to have a chat and for us first gens, it's always nice to meet another one of our kind." He got where Furaha's sense of comradery was coming from.
But he genuinely wasn't anything like the other BAR troopers.
And as such, he didn't think that it was his place to pretend to be either.
"I'll keep it in mind, but don't wait for me," the specialist offered diplomatically before offering her a brief, albeit unnecessary salute and then entering the captain's quarter of the Scott where the ship VI unlocked a transmission on the holo-projector coming in from Arcturus of all places.
While the projection assembled itself, Morneau wondered who the hell he knew who was on Arcturus.
He got his answer swiftly.
"Blood hell is it good to see you again, Morneau," Grant Redford opened as soon as the line had finished constructing itself.
Morneau couldn't help but smile at the sight of his former supervising agent.
"Likewise, Redford, likewise," he said in a cheery tone.
"New haircut?" the older specialist observed immediately.
"Old one actually. Figured with Gunn gone, I'd go back to the roots."
"Now that you mention it, you do look like you did back at Grissom, only a lot older," Redford said jokingly before chuckling. "Heh. I just realized. Gunn. Gone. Should we call you Soloman Gone?" he let out wheeze. "Get it, cuz-" Morneau facepalmed with both of his hands.
Redford's sense of humor certainly hadn't changed.
"Speaking of looking old," he interrupted while mumbling into his hands. "I could say the same about you," he retorted, still smirking underneath the hand covering his face. Unlike in his case, Redford had actually aged visibly. Even the scar on the left side of his face had wrinkled up over the years. Redford had never removed it because as far as he was concerned, it was a reminder to his 'second date slash field op' with his now-wife - Morneau's very own combat instructor Tela Vasir.
"True, but if you do it, it's rude and disrespectful of your elders," the older man said before adopting a more serious tone. "I heard you took a little unsanctioned detour to the Wave's headquarters before leaving the Citadel."
"I saw a target of opportunity and I took it."
"I know, I already got your intel on PGI," Redford responded. "That's actually what I wanted to talk to you about. But before we get to that mess, I wanna give you a heads-up. Brass won't like it when they figure out that you're turning this into a rescue-op for that Wong girl. There'll probably be a few Internal Affairs hearing, maybe even an investigation if things don't go as planned."
"Yeah, I knew that was coming when I made the call."
"Yet you still did it," Redford shook his head. "What the hell were you thinking, Morneau?"
The question surprised him.
"Following your teachings," Morneau responded immediately. "You said that I had to make sure I always ended up on the right side of things when the chips are on the table," Redford nodded affirmingly. "And as far as I'm concerned, trying to save a journalist kidnapped by the Shadow Broker is the right thing. So that's what I did," he explained. "I figured if anyone would understand, it'd be you."
"You've got this all wrong, Morneau. I do understand," Redford retorted immediately. "Problem is, I'm not the one you're going to have to convince. Internal Affairs are the guys you'll have to talk to."
"I'll handle IA when I get there," Morneau shrugged. "Let's get to why you called. PGI."
"Right," Redford nodded. "Before I go on, you should know that this really is a secure line. No one but you and me can listen in on what we're saying, I made sure of that," that statement made Morneau worried and curious in equal parts. If Redford wanted no one to listen in on what he wanted to tell Morneau, the news was both juicy and bad.
"What's going on, Redford?"
"Way too much," the other specialist sighed. "You might not know this, but ever since Sovereign tried to open the Citadel Relay, I've been on a special assignment from Director Rei. He's got me looking for indoctrinated people on Arcturus. Before you lose your shit though, I haven't found any. Yet," that certainly explained Redford's absence from any field-op in the last two years. "Anyways. As soon as news of PGI trying to pull a hit on Emily came through," that would be Emily as in Commander Emily Shepard, Redford's niece, and not Emily as in Emily Wong, Solomon Gunn's girlfriend, "Rei put me on their case too."
"You think PGI's connected to the Reapers?"
"Not just that. We think PGI's the indoctrinated element of our government that I've been looking for all this time," Redford went on.
"Hold up, PGI has government ties? How'd you get that from my intel?" he asked with a hint of confusion.
"It's not from your intel. It's a conclusion I got from looking at the evidence," Redford corrected. "Without explaining every little nook and cranny to you, the simple version's this. Morinth, the crazy Ardat-Yakshi who tried to whack Emily on Illium, got the job to kill her on Illium way before Emily ever got there. The Normandy was still in transit when Morinth arrived in Nos Astra to complete the contract."
"Meaning someone who knew where Shepard was going told PGI," Morneau muttered before putting a hand in front of his mouth to think. If PGI had someone like that on their hook, this problem was even worse than he'd figured.
"Yes. Exactly," Redford sighed loudly." The details of Emily's mission and her location aren't common knowledge for most people and we can already rule out the most likely suspects in form of the crew members. Every transmission that leaves the Normandy is monitored and trust me when I say this, you can't sneak a transmission off an HSA warship without anyone noticing," Redford went on, likely referring to the whole Makalu-mess. Personally, Morneau still found it hilarious that it had been the captain all along back then.
"So the only way that's possible is if someone way up the chain blabbered," he figured.
"Afraid so," Redford replied. "It gets worse too. We're not talking about people like some low-level supply clerk scheduling a refueling or something like that. Knowing where the Normandy goes before it gets there is top-tier, need-to-know grade of operational knowledge," or in short, their level of security clearance or higher.
"Shit."
"Shit indeed," Redford repeated before dropping another bomb on Morneau. "As soon as you're done with the Broker, I want your help with this. Considering what the info surrounding Morinth's attempt on Emily's life implies, you're about the only person left on Cronos that I'm ready to trust one hundred percent."
As soon as Redford had mentioned trusting no one on Cronos Station, Yo-yo, Yegor, Robin, Aiden and all his other friends came into mind. Then a rational question he'd ask himself if the roles were reversed popped out of his mouth.
"Why me?"
"Because I trained you and I know that you don't have a disloyal bone in your body. No offense, but you couldn't go rogue if your life depended on it."
He appreciated the compliment, obviously, but he still had another rational point to make. Even if he knew that he wasn't who Redford was looking for, he had to ask the next question.
"From what you're saying, there's a good chance the mole's indoctrinated, right?" he asked, ignoring the paranoid part of his brain that was telling him that this question was also a test to see if Redford – who had made it clear that he really wanted to keep a wrap on this – wasn't the mole himself.
He took a mental pause at that thought.
The Solomon Gunn job really had made him paranoid, hadn't it?
"Right."
"So wouldn't someone without a disloyal bone in their body who just happened to have run into a Reaper artifact three years ago be the perfect suspect?"
"They would," Redford responded before folding his arms. "But you've been out of the intel loop ever since October and you also happen to be the reason we knew about Insight before they tried to whack Emily in the first place. So you couldn't have leaked her location to begin with. Also you would be a pretty shit mole. You ripped your own shadow organization out of anonymity before they tried their first public stunt against us. That's like the opposite of what a mole's supposed to do."
Okay.
That was a sound and logical argument and it certainly silenced that treacherous little nagging voice in the back of his head which had questioned the integrity of the guy who had made him the man he was today.
"Alright, I yield," he chuckled while raising his arms. "As soon as I'm done stopping the Broker, you can count on me."
"Unless IA arrests you, obviously," Redford pointed out.
"Yes. Unless IA arrests me," Morneau repeated. "I'm going to assume that you haven't told anyone else about this?"
"And you'd assume correctly."
"Not even Director Rei?"
"Yes. Not even Director Rei."
"You know I could think of a couple of people in Thirteen that I'd trust. Some others on Cronos station too," Morneau offered.
"And while I'm sure that's well warranted on your part, I'm asking you not to tell any of them. I went through the whole list of guys who aren't on long-term undercover ops right now and you're still the only person I could rule out. Everyone else could've done it. And yes, that includes Yo-yo."
He wouldn't lie.
Even considering the possibility of her being indoctrinated -no matter how impossible that was - stung a lot worse than walking through any annihilation field.
But still…
"Understood. This stays between you and me and no one else."
"Good," Redford said before his features softened up again. "Now go bag yourself a Broker and break out the journalist while you're at it. Saving the innocent is always nice to equal out your karma."
"Since when do you believe in karma?"
"I don't. I just wanted to say something supportive so that you finally stop dragging your ass and finish up the op," Redford smirked. From what I heard, you've been slacking to get more time out of the fancy apartment you had. That's not how I taught you," he chuckled.
"Lancelot told you that?"
"I will neither confirm nor deny that I spoke with someone else. In fact, I will go on the record and claim that I have no idea who Yegor even is," Redford deflected. "Happy hunting, Morneau."
"Thanks. I'll call you when it's done," he glanced at his watch. "Although I'm afraid it's gonna be another couple of days before I even get there."
"Four day ride, isn't it?" Morneau nodded. "I see. In the meantime, I suggest you read up on the PGI investigation file I sent you."
"That's a hundred pages."
"You've got time, don't you?"
"Did I mention that I could be getting wasted with my teenage-fantasy right now?"
"No, but right of the get-go I can think of a couple of reasons why you're not going to do that. Starting with-"
Before Redford could say whatever he wanted to say, Morneau interrupted him.
"No need to elaborate, I'll read it!" he called quickly, prompting Redford to laugh.
"I was gonna say your commitment to the mission and professionalism, but alright. I hope you enjoy it. Be seeing you, Morneau."
"Yeah. Later."
Meanwhile, 21. April 2417 AD, Arcadia, Engram-City
"From what the Broker tells us, he's put a lid on the last journalist who's been trying to interfere with our operation," a dark-haired man with slicked-back hair said before resting his feet on the expensive wooden desk and glancing out of the window of his very own first skyscraper. By now it was just one of many, of course, but since it happened to be the first he had built, he still liked coming here. "She's on her way to him now and as soon as he gets his yahg-y fingers on her, we'll know exactly how much she figured out," he finished.
"That makes how many disappeared journalists?" one of his associates asked.
"Since the start of our operation, or in this year?" another wanted clarification.
"This year," the first clarified.
"Seventeen. One in the HSA," that one had been particularly tricky, "nine on the Citadel and seven in the CIP," the dark-haired man said casually while playing with his golden analogue watch. It was a family heirloom, passed down from one generation of businessmen to the next even now that it was long since outdated. "And while I think I can speak for all of us when I say that paying to make them disappear isn't the issue, I think we can all agree that it's about time we rooted out the person that's making them a problem in the first place."
"Agreed," one person on the secured comm-link muttered. "Didn't the Broker want to take care of that?"
"He promised he would," the man said while observing his polished shoes and spotting the faintest imperfection on their surface. He'd have to sort that out as soon as this call was done. Good staff was so hard to find these days. "But as with plenty of his recent promises, he doesn't seem to have been able to deliver."
"You're talking about Soloman Gunn, aren't you?"
"Yes and no. I'm talking about the issue that he represents. I think we can all agree that the man was most likely an HSAIS operative, no?" All other members of the call voiced their agreement. "And I think we also all know that he wasn't just any operative, but one of their Section 13 or Cerberus deluxe models," again he was met with agreement. "And there we have it. That's the issue he represents. The highest tier of human intelligence knows we exist and if their history is anything to go by, they aren't the kind of enemy you want to have. The bodies they've buried over the centuries are half the reason the HSA's empire has managed to survive as long as it did. A few committed men in the right place can make all the difference in the world," he reasoned.
"I think that issue is clear to all of us," one of the disembodied voices retorted. "What we'd like to hear from you is the solution you are no doubt about to propose. I don't need to remind you that you're the reason we have this problem to begin with, no?"
"No you don't." He inspected his fingernails and leaned back in his chair while making a mental note to punish the person who'd said that later down the line. How dare they imply he was at fault for this?"What has been our ultimate goal ever since we've started this collaboration?" he asked in a way similar to how he liked to open his business meetings. Since no one in the call seemed to feel addressed by him, he answered his own question.
"To seek knowledge and to transcend the limits of our current technology so that those who come after may find themselves in an improved and orderly society," he declared. "Only by staying true to this purpose can we stay our course and reach our goal. In that spirit, I say that our best move is to figure out just how much those two agencies know about us and then go about our way to slowly disassemble them."
"You want to spy on the spies and pretend everything else is fine?"
"Scratch that, he's saying he wants to go to war with them. This is madness."
"I find both of those points to be oversimplified," the man noted. "Yes, I want to spy on the spies and continue on with our operations against the HSA and CIP. And yes, I also want to eventually remove our opposition form the equation. However the way that we get there is still open for debate," he went on before diverting from the line of thought because he hadn't actually come up with any idea to handle those two agencies. They were troublesome and pesky and secluded like small sects. "While we are on the subject of debate, I'd also like to discuss starting our operations against the IFS. From what I've been told, the Iffys have started to tread on dangerous territory. They're slowly but surely stopping to be useful and starting to become dangerous."
"You are referring to the recent June-Incident?" one of the more brash associates of their collaboration argued.
"I'm referring to Drescher's entire gig with the Lystheni, actually, but yes, June is excellent proof of this particular problem. What they've been doing could jeopardize our goals."
"I think you're overestimating them. The Iffys are a bunch of stupid separatist bumfucks living out an independence fantasy that ended forty years ago. The only thing dangerous about them is that they've still got that experimental battle cruiser of theirs," ah yes. The famous New Dawn… what he wouldn't give to add one of those ships to the small elite force PGI had been assembling in the shadows.
"A worryingly large percentage of them have understood what we seek and are spreading it out on the extranet for all to read."
"Maybe. But those guys you are talking about are being dismissed as tin-foil-toms and chemtrail-joes. They're hardly a threat."
"Yet they are also the most likely group from which the person we're looking to stop might operate."
"You think the leaker is an Iffy nutcase?"
"I think it's reasonable to assume that someone from that spectrum would be looking to disarm an operation such as our own. They already thought the HSA was invasive, how do you think they'd react to the world order we're trying to build? I can already see their stupid posters. Core world fascism on the rise. Save the Fringe, blow up a clinic today!" he said mockingly.
"I don't know what they'd think of us and I don't care either. We both know their type won't be around to see our order."
He wanted to discuss that everyone would have a place in the world they wanted to build – even if it was as nothing but a lowly shoe-polisher with a compliance chip in their brain– but the blinking hologram on his desk distracted him. "My final say is that we should consider them a threat and I propose that we vote on our actions by tomorrow," again, he was met with nothing but agreement, "now, if you'd excuse me, there are other matters I have to attend."
He terminated the line and opened the hologram.
"Hello, Judy," he answered his secretary's call with a warm smile. "How may I help you?"
"Mister Lawson, Sir, I am just calling to inform you that your three o'clock is already here."
"My three o'clock?" Henry Lawson replied, faking uncertainty so that Judy would feel the need to remind him. Given that he was he, he obviously knew that he had a meeting scheduled with his chief geneticist. Ever since his oldest offspring had rebelled and her younger sister had followed her poor example, he had to consider redundancies.
"Professor Siwongi from the Research department, Sir."
"Ah. Of course. Thank you, Judy. You truly are a darling."
"Just doing my job, Mister Lawson."
Codex: The Fringe Wars 2380 AD
After the beginning of the HSA's autumn offense of 2379 AD, which in addition to starting the devastating Siege of Horizon that would leave nearly ninety million dead in less then 15 months, also saw the beginning of the invasions of Ulysses and a continued push into the direction of Shanxi, two other worlds of the original Separatist Seven, the year 2380 AD was opened by the HSA's first major victory on an industrial hub of the IFS; the Liberation of Ulysses.
Whereas fighting on Horizon had bogged down due to the world's high degree of urbanization and the heavy resistance of its population, the invasion of the far less densely populated Ulysses (407,021,058 inhabitants as of the last census taken before the Fringe Wars in 2374 AD) was declared over at the start of February 2380 AD.
But despite their early successes in the campaign meant to 'finish the war', the operations to establish footholds and a steady supply line towards Shanxi and the surrounding frontier worlds that had since joined the IFS and formed its core and the 'critical defeat' expected on Horizon fell short.
Due to the exceedingly high commitment of the HSAN to the Siege of Horizon and the need to harden HSA core space against any IFS incursion, the number of forces needed to secure the long supply corridor to Shanxi and its surrounding frontier worlds couldn't be met.
Because of this lack of security and the continued raiding – chiefly headed by the IFSDF's new class of battlecruisers, the BC-313 New Dawn – the HSA's push for the IFS's capital of Shanxi slowed to a crawl and turned into a series of ground skirmishes centered around planetary outposts and space engagements for control over crucial relay lines that would last until the end of the war in September of 2381.
Similarly, the 'swift' victory against Horizon remained absent. Whereas the HSA had planned for a three-month campaign ending in January of 2380, the fighting on Horizon's surface had quickly turned into the largest land war in HSA history. Spanning all of the planet's inhabited continents and being concentrated around all major population hubs, the fighting on Horizon revealed the true large-scale destructive potential of the mass-effect-age weaponry the HSA had yielded since Unification Day but never used against an enemy with comparative levels of military power.
Whereas the HSA relied on overwhelming force to try and break the IFS stronghold, the IFSDF relied on a mixture of the continued will of Horizon's population to resist the invasion, proven counterstrategies and, as desperation grew, increasingly more outlandish experimental weaponry and tactics.
Over the course of 2380 AD, HSA forces on Horizon would not only face militia forces and regular IFSDF troops using the same gear as them, but also face swarms of experimental drones, remote-controlled Paladin suits, burrowing mobile land mines with virtual intelligences programed to surface within HSA camps, several failed attempts at weaponized plasma and, in a particularly desperate one-time maneuver, stimmed-up and starved Orafas – a type of gargantuan simian predator native to Horizon's tropical regions with skin thick enough to stop small-arms gunfire.
In total, the year 2380 AD ended with a death toll of 85,2 million people, dwarfing the toll of 2379 (20.8 million) by several magnitudes and once more left no end to the fighting in sight.
A/N:
So i obviously didn't meet my christmas release because I dicked around a lot...
I know. Who could've seen that one coming aye?
So, this chapter, as promised, is the catalyst for the conclusion of the shadow broker arc and as such, focused almost entirely on Morneau. (I think this is something I'll stick too from here on out, the 'important' chapters are going to be entirely about those characters, similarly to how I did it with shepard and illium)
As such... we just got more development for the story lines associated with him...
aand that huge reveal by the end.
Miranda's dad's a dick.
What a surprise, am i right?
O.K.
So before you go "wait, PGI is just discount Cerberus! :c" ... just hear me out, alright?
I know that the idea of a group of industrialists working against the humans isn't new to mass effect.
But I do have something more unique in mind.
Other than that. I don't actually have a lot to say for this chapter. It was fun to write Morneau again because with him, I've got enough reasons to not have everything devlove into a shoot-out the way things do with shepard and haugen. he's just more of a talker, I guess, and so he gets larger chunks of dialogue to solve his problems.
Which is of course not to say that he won't shoot the shit out of the broker's ship soon.
While you wait for the next chapter where that happens, I highly suggest you hop on over to Anthologies and read the latest entry to the series that I released on Christmas. As you're all well aware by now, it's a guest story.
And while you do that, I'll do this.
For the record we're at 763 reviews, 1182 favorites and 1268 follows.
See you around next time.
